I don’t think it’s accurate to say LW focuses on atheism. Consider: this is the only post whose title involves atheism or any religion on the first page of the discussion section (40 posts, for me).
He lists some things in the overlap between science and religion. Some of them (cosmology, education) are indeed clearly things on which religion and science disagree, but these:
Law
Morality
Human Rights
Sexuality
Equality
I’m not aware of any notorious insights science has brought us about morality or human rights or equality; sure there are some relatively obscure subjects like Decision Theory or Experimental Psychology that deal with morality, but those do not frequently crop up in debates about religion.
I’m not aware of anything about sexuality where Religion disagrees with scientific conclusions (unlike other topics like evolution or cosmology or archeology or textual analysis of “Holy Texts”).
So, why include those elements, if Science has little to say about them, or if religion doesn’t mind Science’s conclusions?
What’s missing from the picture is ideology: socialism, communism, libertarianism, objectivism, environmentalism, progressivism, etc. Those often imply strong positions on some of these issues, which may imply disagreement with religion. In fact, among all the competing ideologies that are supposed to tell us how man is supposed to live, which actions are to be praised and which are to be condemned, why single out religious ideologies? What makes them different from the others?
Religious ideologies tend to be older, and tend to imply a belief in the supernatural, but they still have many differences from each other, and much in common with more modern ideologies: they make people feel better about themselves, use the same group psychology levers, praise people for “believing” in claims of the ideology independently of the truth of the claims.
By comparison, science doesn’t aim at telling us how to live any more than cooking does, it’s just a set of techniques for figuring out true facts about the world.
Many of those supposed “points of disagreement between religion and Science” are actually points of disagreement between ideologies, some of which happen to be more compatible with science’s conclusions than others. But if Catholicism disagrees with science about cosmology, and Objectivism doesn’t, then that still doesn’t tell us much about who is right when Catholicism and Objectivism disagree about Human Rights.
And many of the criticism of religion could be targeted at other ideologies too, who can also be dogmatic and intolerant of questioning. Singling out religion is unfair.
Agreed, there’s some stuff in psychology that is interesting for morality (The Stanford Prison Experiment is a similar example), but it’s very limited and ambiguous compared to the moral worldviews you get in religious or political literature.
This is a comic, but not a rage comic. Not all comics on Reddit are rage comics.
I don’t think it’s accurate to say LW focuses on atheism. Consider: this is the only post whose title involves atheism or any religion on the first page of the discussion section (40 posts, for me).
Man, this week may be a harsh week to post stuff.
You misspelled the post’s title.
He lists some things in the overlap between science and religion. Some of them (cosmology, education) are indeed clearly things on which religion and science disagree, but these:
Law
Morality
Human Rights
Sexuality
Equality
I’m not aware of any notorious insights science has brought us about morality or human rights or equality; sure there are some relatively obscure subjects like Decision Theory or Experimental Psychology that deal with morality, but those do not frequently crop up in debates about religion.
I’m not aware of anything about sexuality where Religion disagrees with scientific conclusions (unlike other topics like evolution or cosmology or archeology or textual analysis of “Holy Texts”).
So, why include those elements, if Science has little to say about them, or if religion doesn’t mind Science’s conclusions?
What’s missing from the picture is ideology: socialism, communism, libertarianism, objectivism, environmentalism, progressivism, etc. Those often imply strong positions on some of these issues, which may imply disagreement with religion. In fact, among all the competing ideologies that are supposed to tell us how man is supposed to live, which actions are to be praised and which are to be condemned, why single out religious ideologies? What makes them different from the others?
Religious ideologies tend to be older, and tend to imply a belief in the supernatural, but they still have many differences from each other, and much in common with more modern ideologies: they make people feel better about themselves, use the same group psychology levers, praise people for “believing” in claims of the ideology independently of the truth of the claims.
By comparison, science doesn’t aim at telling us how to live any more than cooking does, it’s just a set of techniques for figuring out true facts about the world.
Many of those supposed “points of disagreement between religion and Science” are actually points of disagreement between ideologies, some of which happen to be more compatible with science’s conclusions than others. But if Catholicism disagrees with science about cosmology, and Objectivism doesn’t, then that still doesn’t tell us much about who is right when Catholicism and Objectivism disagree about Human Rights.
And many of the criticism of religion could be targeted at other ideologies too, who can also be dogmatic and intolerant of questioning. Singling out religion is unfair.
(cross-posted to Reddit)
What about the Milgram experiment? Its results seem to say something important about morality.
Agreed, there’s some stuff in psychology that is interesting for morality (The Stanford Prison Experiment is a similar example), but it’s very limited and ambiguous compared to the moral worldviews you get in religious or political literature.